Roald’s friendship with Michael and the fact that he was no longer a fag began to make Repton more tolerable, as did the fact that he had successfully smuggled one of his pet rats into the school to keep him company. He told his shocked friend Ben Reuss that there was “no animal more intelligent or cleaner.”53 His fascination with photography deepened. Increasingly he spent hours on his own in the school darkroom. “I was the only boy who practised it seriously,”54 he would later write, and after the summer of 1931, the subject dominates his letters home. His mother is bombarded with a stream of requests for lenses, photographic films and paper, while his latest set of prints—mostly of buildings, landscapes and the occasional botanical specimen—are usually enclosed for comments. “I’ve got a marvellous one of the baths, with reflection in it, so that you can hardly tell which way up it is,” he writes in June 1931. “Dr. Barton the science master is going to give me eight shillings for it.”55 Two years later, Dahl was winning competitions. Music too—mostly in the form of the gramophone—was another escape. Roald’s taste was largely classical—the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber was a favorite—while he was also a fan of the black American bass, Paul Robeson and opera arias sung by Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini. His art master, Arthur Norris, encouraged his interest in painting, too, and particularly the works of the French Impressionists.
Bizarrely for a school that was so brutal, by the 1920s Repton had also developed quite a reputation for the arts and literature. The novelists Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward were pupils during the First World War, while Isherwood’s friend, the poet W. H. Auden, had been named by his father—an Old Reptonian—after the local church, St. Wystan’s. Dahl absorbed these literary values—even if Auden and Isherwood would never be his favorite writers. He never acknowledged it, but his English teacher, the war poet and cricketer John Crommelin-Brown, was another early influence, encouraging him to use imaginative language, but expressed correctly and elegantly. A contemporary, David Atkins, recalled “Crummers” repeatedly urging his pupils never to use a long word where a short one would do, and always “to keep your sentences free of froth.”56 Roald too would later recall that his education was “relentlessly directed” toward writing short, clear sentences that “said precisely what one meant them to say.”57 Sometimes this was achieved with puzzles, such as this example of why one needs to punctuate properly:
If you go to the zoo you will see elephants playing the saxophone you first take a breath and swallow the mouthpiece is then taken between the lips and firmly to boot polish people are proud to be or not to be is what Hamlet said when bathing the baby care must be taken to clean up his sparking plugs should be the regular practice of every driver who wants easy running does are female wives may forgive husbands never tell took a bow and shot the apple through the inside left raced down the field and shot a gaol civilisation being what it is is still necessary for locking up the undesirable flies fly and pigs don’t brown is a dentist and can be seen any day drawing stumps is a sign that the match is over.58
Roald sent it on to his mother, with a sealed, correctly punctuated version, in case she could not work it out.
His surviving school essays are notable for their celebration of the imagination. Many already display an acute use of dialogue and a delight in the possibilities of the unexpected. Some anticipate his children’s writing forty or fifty years later. In an essay on Nursery Rhymes, Dahl writes of a child wandering into a vegetable garden, “enchanted to think that Jack is probably hiding up one of those large beanstalks.” Similarly, he describes another child, Little Jill, climbing out of bed at night and tiptoeing to the window “to peep through a chink in the curtains, at the cows in the field below. Oh when, oh when, would she see one jump over the Moon.…” He contrasts Little Jill’s sense of fantasy scornfully with a “detestable” boy called Pip, who is “self-centered and unimaginative, with no vestige of excitement about him.”59 And his most striking Repton essay is about dreaming itself. A series of interrupted poetic reveries that remind his teacher of Tennyson also reveal a more modern, sometimes Wildean sensibility. An iceberg, “hard and cold, like some great fragment of an icy coast, far away, Northward” gives way to a scene where a tap drips onto a delicate crane fly. Its drops “welled limpid, on the lip, and fell with a little splash upon the insect below.” Then waves like a “wounded tiger” boil over in “a turmoil of green and white,” while overhead hang “wet black clouds, heavy with rain, like airships of paper filled with oil.”60 One by one the images tumble onto each other in a kaleidoscope of color and sensation before they finally shatter, as Dahl is roughly awakened. Four boys have lifted up his bed and are trying to tip him out of it onto the cold floor of the dormitory.
Roald’s unexpected similes reinforce David Atkins’s memories of competing with Dahl for a school poetry prize. The subject apparently was “The Evening Sky.” Atkins’s attempt was romantic and constructed in formal metric rhyme. Dahl’s apparently was bitter and anarchic, beginning: “Evening clouds, like frog spawn, spoil the sky.” Atkins recalled playing fives with Dahl afterwards and taking him to task for his sourness, whereupon Dahl confessed to him that “Life isn’t beautiful and sentimental and clear. It’s full of foul things and horrid people, and incidentally, rhyming is old hat.”61 It was a rare moment of openness from a writer who had already learned to keep his emotional cards close to his chest. However, his main weapon for keeping “foul things and horrid people” at bay was not his sullenness, but a wicked, quirky and decidedly vulgar sense of humor—one which he retained well into old age, describing himself with great pride on a number of occasions as a “geriatric child.”62 “Laughter temporarily prevents gloomy thinking and melancholy brooding,” he wrote in a schoolboy essay that concluded anarchically, “What an infinitely superior animal a dog would be if he laughed aloud when his master fell off a ladder.”63 Roald himself was proud of his skills as a humorist and enjoyed sharpening his talents in his letters to his mother, who shared his taste for absurdist comedy. In an exchange about whether dried figs were flattened by being trodden down, for example, her son wrote home one day with an exciting new development: “One fellow in my study, who claims to have licked an Arab’s foot, said he recognised the taste on the surface of his fig. I said, ‘Not really?’ and he answered, ‘No, on second thoughts, perhaps they are Italians’ feet!’ ”64
Sport was another refuge. Dahl was a competent footballer and cricketer, but he excelled at squash and fives, rapidly becoming the best player in the school. And, despite his delight in the luxuries of life, such as good food and beautiful flowers, he was not without a fascination for Spartan values. In training for a football match, he tells his mother proudly he has to observe the following rules: “No eating between meals, except fruit which you may eat as much as you like. No fizzy drinks. A certain amount of ‘charged’ exercise every day. Skipping after prayers in the evening. No soaking in hot baths. A cold shower after baths. No playing on the yard. A good walk on Sunday afternoon.”65
His height and size—he was six foot five by his mid-teens—also meant that for his final two years at Repton he was largely left alone. David Atkins, though from a different house, felt that even when Dahl was a junior boy there was something intimidating about him.66 Roald certainly learned to enjoy this sense of otherness and isolation, and his long walks through the countryside gave him ample opportunity to indulge his imagination. In his very first letter home he wrote that “the best bit [of life at Repton] is we are allowed to go anywhere we like when nothing is happening,”67 while in the first draft of Boy he described himself simply as “rather dreamy.”68 It was while he was out walking on his own, smoking his pipe,69 fishing, collecting bird’s eggs, berries or crab apples, that he honed his observations of the natural world. These country walks were a constant feature of his life at Repton. They kept him sane and gave him a context both to watch and to dream. It was the same for another unhappy contemporary of his at school, the artist and wri
ter Denton Welch.
Welch had arrived in September 1929, a term before Roald. Though they were not in the same house and did not become friends, they were certainly aware of each other. Both loathed the school, but while Dahl toughed it out, Welch caused a scandal by running away. In the first draft of Boy, Dahl wrote admiringly of his contemporary: “There was another boy in the school while I was there who was later to become a writer like me. His name was Denton Welch, and a fine writer he became. He wasn’t in the same house as me, so I never got to know him, but every day I used to see Denton Welch walking to class all on his own, a tall frail bespectacled boy who looked totally miserable. He must have had more courage than me, or possibly less tolerance, because he refused to put up with it all. One day he escaped and ran away and never came back.”70
In fact, Welch did come back but only for a few weeks, before his father secured a passage for his son to join him in Shanghai. By the time he was in his sixties, Roald had forgotten this detail. Fifty years earlier he had told his mother precisely what happened. He could not possibly admit to her that he too longed to escape—after all, he had made his promise to the doctor in Llandaff—so his tone remained, as always, positive and upbeat. “There are two Brothers in Brook House called Welch,” he wrote, “and one did not want to come back to school, so at the station he told his bro. that he was going to buy a paper. But he didn’t return. And no one knew where he was. The truth of the matter was he had bottled & taken a train to Salisbury, where he went to a cousin aged 63 & told him a pack of lies. The next day, he went to Exeter. He had to pawn his watch to get money & was found by a Policeman wandering about in the streets of Exeter at midnight with tenpence in his pocket. He slept the night in a cell. He is now back at school, & seems quite happy!!!!”71
Ironically, in Maiden Voyage, Welch’s own account of life at Repton, this “escape” turned him into something of a celebrity, and on his return, he was treated with new respect by many of the boys and the masters. “ ‘Good God, Welch, have you come back?’ ” one boy exclaims. “ ‘I heard that you had got hold of forty pounds and gone off to France, and someone else told me that Iliffe had taken you to Italy.’ ” Iliffe, Welch adds, was an older boy who “had shown a frank interest in people younger than himself.” Welch’s Repton memoir was, in many respects, a twin of Dahl’s. Both shared a horror of the open lavatories and of the school’s many tortures, which included boys being stripped naked and having chewing gum rubbed into their pubic hair, or an initiation procedure where a child was forced to hang from a wooden ceiling beam and kiss a set of lips that had been painted onto the timber, while his naked body was flicked at with wet towels. “I had been told that you could lift the skin off someone’s back in this way,” Welch wrote. “I always waited, half in horror, to see a ribbon of flesh come off.”72
Welch’s ability to catch the child’s fear of uncertainty, the dread of what may happen next, is something that he shared with Dahl.§ But, unlike his contemporary, what he also explores is a sexual dimension to life at Repton. Welch’s own burgeoning homosexuality may have made the all-male environment of a public school more immediately charged in this respect than it was for Roald, but it’s interesting that the latter, who was later to take some pleasure in tales of sexual perversity, never mentioned this aspect of his schooldays. Welch’s description of a Repton beating evokes Galloping Foxley in its bounding assailant, its descriptive detail and its economy of style. But it also addresses the adolescent sexual confusion that these beatings provoked. “ ‘Bend over the desk please.’ The moment had come. I held my tongue between my teeth, biting on it, trying to make it hurt; then I put my hands over my eyes and burrowed inwards to myself. My eyes bored down long passages of glittering darkness as I waited. I heard Newman’s feet shuffle lightly on the boards, then the faint whine of the cane in the air. There were two bars of fire eating into the ice, then nothing. … Through the pain that was biting into me I felt a surge of admiration for Newman, yet I hated myself for liking him. The other part of me wanted to smash his face into a pulp. My mind was rocking about like a cart on a rough road.”73
Dahl seldom publicly discussed his own sexual experiences, although when he did, it was usually to a humorous end. The tale of his house-master’s explanation of the perils of masturbation, which alluded to a torch with a limited power supply and concluded with the stern advice “not to touch it—or the batteries will go flat” was honed to comic perfection over many years of public speaking. But that, it seems, was as far as Dahl’s sex education went at school. Charles Pringle, who overlapped with Roald in his first year at The Priory and who was his fag for a term, similarly remembered how uncomfortable J. S. Jenkyns was discussing sex, although he could not recall the story of the torch.74 And, despite the permissive atmosphere at Oakwood, Sofie Magdalene did not think this was part of her maternal responsibilities either. Roald’s sister Else told her daughter Anna that her mother had done nothing to prepare her for her first period. In pain and frightened by the bleeding, Else went to Sofie Magdalene for reassurance and was given short shrift. “Go and talk to your sister,” was her response. Alfhild was apparently no more helpful. “It was Birgit [the nanny] who told everyone the facts of life,” Else recalled. “Extremely inaccurately.”75 By the summer of 1933, Roald was longing for contact with girls outside his family. Having taken a course of dancing lessons, the sixteen-year-old was eager to monopolize Kari, a Norwegian friend of his sisters, at the school’s end-of-year dance. Louis, his twenty-seven-year-old half brother, had also been invited to the event, and Roald was desperately concerned that Kari would find him more attractive. He told his mother that Louis should stick to dancing with Ma Binks.76
There were girls in the village, and others in Derby, who formed friendships with Repton boys. Some were even jokingly referred to as “so-and-so’s wife.”77 However, it’s likely that Dahl’s own adolescent sexual desires were largely unfulfilled until he left the school. His stature and aloofness probably made him immune to the sexual advances of older boys such as the dandy Middleton with his silk cravats, or the bully W. W. Wilson, with his exotic hybrid chrysanthemums, nor is there much evidence that he had close friendships with younger boys. David Atkins recalled that Roald had had more than the distant contact he admitted with Denton Welch. Atkins wrote that he remembered them in En glish lessons together, the six-five Dahl, “voice already broken,” playing Romeo to Welch’s Juliet in a reading of the Shakespeare play, and that a “romantic friendship” formed between the two boys.78 Atkins even remembered Dahl making a “determined grab” for Welch’s private parts on the first day of term.79 “Welch was a natural target for cruelty,” he wrote elsewhere, “and Dahl was sometimes protective, but also enjoyed hurting him. Welch, surely a masochist, would pretend to run away; Dahl would catch him and twist his arm behind his back until tears came. He also applied Chinese burns to the skin of Welch’s wrist. The rest of us stood and watched; we were all a little frightened of Dahl.”80
That Dahl and Welch might have been drawn to one another is not surprising. Welch, like Michael Arnold, was an outsider. But he was gone by the summer of 1932. Nor would Michael Arnold survive his full term at Repton. The circumstances of Arnold’s departure reveal again how much Dahl kept from his mother, and how much his letters are to some degree early essays in fiction. It all began when “Binks” brought Arnold, the subversive, into the fold and made him a boazer, with all the powers that entailed. In January 1933, during a “devilishly cold” spell of weather, Roald told his mother that he and Michael had been out illicitly skating. “But he must be careful what he does now,” he added, “as he’s just been made a house prefect.”81 Things soon began to go wrong for Arnold. Not that there is any trace of this in Roald’s letters home, which continue as ever in their chatty, upbeat descriptions of pike fishing, fox-hunting, and killing rooks with a catapult.82 On May 7, he told his mother that he was in Michael’s study again this term,83 regaling her with details about a photograph o
f a grasshopper he was enlarging and requesting her to send patent leather shoes for a dancing lesson. But the following week he delivered a bombshell:
Do you know what has happened; Michael has had a severe mental breakdown and has had to go away for the rest of the term before he goes to Oxford. He is staying in a lonely inn, up in Westmoreland all alone + perfect quiet, which is essential for him to have. I don’t think he’ll mind it, because he rather enjoys tramping about on moors & things alone all day. I have had quite a lot to do arranging all his things, returning all his books to the masters from whom he had borrowed them, packing a crate full of his books, & putting everything else in his trunk. I’m very sorry he’s gone, but now I go about with Smith, that fellow from Bromley. To show how darned popular he was—half the house has written to him already.
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